11.10.15  When I started this blog, I talked about how I go out the kitchen pantry door in the dark of early mornings, and see what the day beholds.  It’s when I do my star-gazing, as I wait for the coffee cup to fill from the espresso machine.  This time of year, there are long stretches when there is nothing but dense cloud cover, day after day.   It rained hard and steady yesterday in 40 degree temperatures.  I don’t think I ever took my wool scarf off my neck until bedtime.  So, it was a big surprise, early this morning, to look out the kitchen window and see Venus, sparkling bright, over the garage.

Also, this morning, there was an email from Spot The Station, NASA’s notification that the International Space Station would be visible at 6:22 a.m. WSW for five minutes as it moved ENE.  So, with a parka over my robe and boots on my feet, we took the lantern and walked down the crunchy frost-bit grass to the end of the dock and turned off the light.  The kitties bounded along down there with us and sat beside our feet, waiting for the show.  It is a magnificent feeling to be standing out over the dark water, with a heavenly sky of stars overhead.  I saw a shooting star (probably a Taurid meteor) just before 6:22 a.m., and then the Space Station, the brightest object in the sky, came into view from the top of Blacktail Mountain, and made its trajectory over our heads and into the trees to the ENE.

When I got back to the house and my hot coffee, I went to the live feed from the Space Station, and watched the cameras show their own view from the heavens.   What a beautiful blue world of beauty they were seeing as they floated over the world’s sunrises.  I looked at the smiling photo of the crew and read their names.  To think we are all in this world together.  And, there I was, a tiny speck on the end of a dock, in dark and frosty northwest Montana, one November morning, seeing what the skies were like on a new morning.